US-CERT Warns of Crypto Bugs in IEEE Standard

Recent academic work focused on weak cryptographic protections in the implementation of the IEEE P1735 standard has been escalated to an alert published Friday by the Department of Homeland Security. DHS’ US-CERT warned the IEEE P1735 standard for encrypting electronic-design intellectual property and the management of access rights for such IP is flawed. “In the most egregious cases, enable attack vectors that allow recovery of the entire underlying plaintext IP,” US-CERT said in its alert, citing researchers that found the flaw. “Implementations of IEEE P1735 may be weak to cryptographic attacks that allow an attacker to obtain plaintext intellectual property without the key, among other impacts.”